CANR
WORK TITLE: THE NEXT REALIGNMENT
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: www.frankdistefano.com
CITY: Washington
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
LAST VOLUME:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1973.
EDUCATION:Attended Princeton University; Georgetown University, law degree.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and Lawyer. Formerly worked as a law clerk to Judge Diana Motz, United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, Richmond, VA; Williams & Connolly, LLP, Washington, DC, litigator; legislative aide to Congressman Bob Franks, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, DC; Rudy Giulianai 2008 presidential campaign, Deputy National Political Director for Issues.
WRITINGS
Contributor to the American Interest; Georgetown Law Journal, served as a senior articles editor.
SIDELIGHTS
Frank J. DiStefano is a writer and former lawyer who worked as a Congressional aide and on the 2008 presidential campaign staff of Rudy Giuliani. In his book The Next Alignment: Why America’s Parties Are Crumbling and What Happens Next, DiStefano examines both the history and the future of political parties and their realignments in the United States. DiStefano places into historical context what he sees as a major realignment coming once again to the U.S. political stage.
Discussing the early birth of the two-party system, DiStefano goes on to relate various political realignments that have occurred since the United States and the two-party system were established. In the process, he examines the different views over time concerning a weak Federal government and state rights versus strong support for a more populist agenda and powerful executive branch. For example, he points out the differences between two politicians at the early part of the twentieth century. While Republican Teddy Roosevelt sought a pro-business agenda and the importance of reforming the government, William Jennings Bryan, an Evangelical Christian, was a populist who praised workers while vilifying the elites. He also was against teaching evolution in public schools. According to DiStefano, neither of the men would fit the labels of liberal or conservatives a century later.
Turning his attention to the state of U.S. politics and the political parties in the twenty-first century, DiStefano argues that another realignment is coming. According to DiStefano, the two major U.S. political parties have failed to keep up with the vast majority of Americans who are concerned about modern-day issues. Instead, he writes that Democrats and Republicans are still fighting over Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal, and its aftermath. DiStefano points out that five distinct sets of opposing political parties have existed in the United States, and the two-party system has undergone similar cycles in relation to their birth and their ultimate collapse. A common factor in their demise was a changing America over time. He points out that issues these parties debated either were resolved or merely faded. Since the parties were still focused on old ideologies and ideas, they became weaker and weaker until a realignment occurred.
According to DiStefano, the old political order is crumbling while a new era of evolving ideas and ideologies will end up creating new coalitions. DiStefano writes that typically a political party is either taken over by new ideas and leaders or simply dissolves and is replaced by a new party. For example, the Whig party began to fall apart and was replaced by a new Republican party as debates over slavery and a potential civil war arose.
Calling The Next Alignment “an eye-opening exploration of America’s two-party system,” a Kirkus Reviews contributor went on to note DiStefano’s “admirable job of putting history into perspective and providing a balanced view of how the winds of today’s political climate may be blowing.” John R. Coyne, Jr., writing for the Washington Times, remarked: “We might do well to study Mr. DiStefano’s thorough account of our nation’s historic realignments; and based on that history, what’s likely to come.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2019, review of The Next Realignment: Why America’s Parties Are Crumbling and What Happens Next.
ONLINE
Washington Times, https://www.washingtontimes.com/ (May 14, 2019), John R. Coyne, Jr., review of The Next Realignment.
About Frank
Frank is a writer living in Washington, D.C. He has served as a lawyer, a Congressional aide, and as presidential campaign staff.
He was a litigator at the famed Washington firm of Williams and Connolly. He worked in the House of Representatives as a legislative aide to Congressman Bob Franks. He was Deputy National Political Director for Issues on Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign. He served as a law clerk to Judge Diana Motz on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
Frank holds a degree in politics from Princeton and a law degree from Georgetown, where he was Senior Articles Editor on the Georgetown Law Journal.
Frank is a writer living in Washington, D.C. He has served as a lawyer, a Congressional aide, and as presidential campaign staff.
He was a litigator at the famed Washington firm of Williams and Connolly. He worked in the House of Representatives as a legislative aide to Congressman Bob Franks. He was Deputy National Political Director for Issues on Rudy Giuliani's 2008 presidential campaign. He served as a law clerk to Judge Diana Motz on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
Frank holds a degree in politics from Princeton and a law degree from Georgetown, where he was Senior Articles Editor on the Georgetown Law Journal.
You can contact Frank on social media at @frankjdistefano or check out his website frankdistefano.com.
DiStefano, Frank J. THE NEXT REALIGNMENT Prometheus Books (Indie Nonfiction) $26.00 5, 7 ISBN: 978-1-63388-508-0
An eye-opening exploration of America's two-party system.
In this debut book, attorney DiStefano, a former adviser to Rudy Giuliani's 2008 presidential campaign, concludes that a drastic change to American politics is coming soon. He focuses on the concept of party realignment, in which political parties are formed, reformed, and even extinguished over the course of history. Realignments occur, DiStefano explains, when political realities shift and new issues and attitudes force change. The bulk of this work recounts the five different party systems that the United States has known since its inception. It begins with the birth of the two-party system under Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson and continues through the realignments of the Jacksonian era, the run-up to the Civil War, the populism of Democratic politician William Jennings Bryan, and the disruption of the Great Depression. Although the U.S. Constitution doesn't mention political parties, the author argues that its system of governance promotes the continuing existence of two such parties--with each within striking distance of a majority. But America's current system, DiStefano notes, has basically debated the New Deal for eight decades while America has moved on to other issues: "All our parties know how to do--all they were designed to do--is to fight about the world of Franklin Roosevelt." Readers who are well versed in political science will already be familiar with the concept of party realignment at the center of this book. Still, many will find that DiStefano's conclusions are full of common sense, even if the blur of today's contentious political discussion seems to hide such seemingly simple realities. Overall, the author does an admirable job of putting history into perspective and providing a balanced view of how the winds of today's political climate may be blowing. Whether the next realignment is quick and easy or long and drawn-out depends on whether voters and politicians recognize the need for party reform, DiStefano asserts.
A necessary addition to the bookshelves of history buffs and political science enthusiasts.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"DiStefano, Frank J.: THE NEXT REALIGNMENT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2019. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A599964301/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b1f8470c. Accessed 6 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A599964301
How America shapes and re-shapes itself, and what's likely to come
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By John R. Coyne Jr. - - Tuesday, May 14, 2019
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
THE NEXT REALIGNMENT: WHY AMERICA’S PARTIES ARE CRUMBLING AND WHAT HAPPENS NEXT
By Frank J. DiStefano
Prometheus Books, $26, 480 pages
In this compact and well-written history of our nation’s political and ideological systems, Frank J. DiStefano, former litigator and Republican congressional aide who earned his spurs during the “Contract with America” years, examines the shifts, alignments and realignments of our political parties, a dialectic process which has been continuously at work from the earliest days to the present.
He explores the tensions between Hamilton’s Federalists and Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans, the Whigs and Jackson’s Democrats, the demise of the Whigs, the periodic moral awakenings and enthusiasms, “the Civil War parties of North and South, the Populist and Progressive Era parties that reformed America out of the Gilded Age, and our New Deal era parties of today.”
Mr. DiStefano’s New Deal era is that period running from the Depression through WWII to the present — the dominant era of all our lifetimes, with its programs and policies still largely providing the political norms that shape our national life.
Through the 1950s and into the ‘60s, Democrats depended on the New Deal playbook for their programs, while the job of the opposition party was largely accepted as one of managing those programs more efficiently. And the settled wisdom between both parties was that only crackpots believed the New Deal could be undone.
But at midcentury, an eclectic band of thinkers and writers set out to do just that, believing “they could change the assumptions that had come to support the entire American political system.” And in so doing, they gave shape and substance to a formal conservative opposition, which despite various ongoing internal splits and squabbles, proved sufficiently unified in principle to elect a conservative president.
The leader of that movement, the man who made the presidency of Ronald Reagan possible, was William F. Buckley Jr, “among the most consequential figures in twentieth-century political history.”
According to Mr. DiStefano, one of the most important of the Buckley achievements was providing a coherent basis for Republicans no longer to view themselves solely as critics of Democratic policies and positions, “but also to offer [them] a positive agenda of their own built around an alternative ideology of what government should and shouldn’t do.”
Mr. DiStefano gives a good, concise account of the Buckley years and their permanent contributions — moral, economic, intellectual — to the national debate.
There’s also a respectful treatment of contributions made by Richard Nixon and his administration to that debate. True, Watergate has largely eclipsed the positive accomplishments of those years. But in the area of foreign policy, we still live in the age of Nixon and Kissinger. And in the extraordinary landslide victory of 1972, the forerunners of Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” came out in record numbers to deliver a blow to the increasingly distorted New Deal ideology, especially in terms of our culture.
As Pat Buchanan put it in his book “The New Majority (1972),” quoted here by Mr. DiStefano, the landslide Nixon win was “a victory of traditional American values and beliefs over the claims of the counter-culture, a victory of Middle America over the celebrants of the Woodstock Nation.”
The reality of that election, Mr. Buchanan wrote, “makes the long-projected realignment of parties a possibility ” But then came Watergate, and that realignment would have to wait. But the seeds had been planted, and will be contained within the new synthesis.
That synthesis, Mr. DiStefano believes, is very near at hand. “We live at one of history’s great turning points,” he writes. “Monumental change really is afoot. An old order really is falling away and a new one is emerging. We don’t know what the future looks like, other than it won’t follow the rules of decades past.”
“The anger, the bitterness, the dysfunction, the inability of our parties to grapple seriously with the difficult problems the nation faces — they’re just tremors . symptoms of the beginning of the greatest shift in American politics in our lifetime.”
It could well be that the symptoms Mr. DiStefano describes signal the beginning of a period of great change — a period that many believe is already upon us. Or those tremors might reach sufficient intensity to frighten politicians into beating a retreat back from the future into the sanctuary of good old New Deal politics. There are many possibilities. Hillary Clinton may try again. Donald Trump may enter Holy Orders.
But just in case, we might do well to study Mr. DiStefano’s thorough account of our nation’s historic realignments; and based on that history, what’s likely to come.
• John R. Coyne Jr., a former White House speechwriter, is co-author of “Strictly Right: William F. Buckley Jr. and the American Conservative Movement” (Wiley).